Mike Stott is a WordPress lover from Manchester, United Kingdom. He has been a member of WordPress community since 2011. He taught himself PHP, jQuery, and MySQL through WordPress Codex. He is the CEO and founder of Epic Plugins, Epic Themes, and Co-founder of Zero BS CRM. We got to have a little one-on-one talk session with him at WordCamp Kathmandu 2018.
When did you get started with WordPress?
I started using WordPress in around 2011.
What do you like most about WordCamps?
The most thing that I like about WordCamps is that I get to meet new and interesting people. This is the first time that I’ve traveled from the UK to Nepal and it is very much amusing seeing people networking and enjoying.
What do you hope attendees will take away from your talk/workshop?
I hope people will be familiar with the fact that they can free-lance with WordPress or build their own products in WordPress as well from my talk.
Are there any challenges you faced that you’d like to share with us? How did you overcome them?
My parents didn’t really understand what I wanted to do with my profession. I think the main challenge was to convince them and quitting my 9-5 job. Deciding when to leave my job and do the things my own way was very challenging for me. I just went for it though it took me a few years to get the courage.
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community of Nepal?
Well, the WordPress community of Nepal is quite similar to other nation’s communities. It seems that the WordPress community of Nepal or today’s WordCamp have a lot more people than in the UK. I’m very much surprised how many people attended WordCamp Kathmandu 2018.
How have you been contributing or giving back to the community?
Me and my team have been sponsoring a lot of WordCamps. That is the main way we’ve been contributing to the WordPress. Our products are free in WordPress.org so it gives back to anybody that uses WordPress.
What do you think about female participation in WordPress?
I think there would be a growing number of female participation coming up in WordPress. We need to encourage women in many ways; from contributing to speaking, volunteering to organizing.
What can we find you doing when you’re not WordPressing?
When I’m free from work, I like to travel to places with my wife.
What advice would you give to a new WordPress user?
For beginners in the WordPress field, make sure to go to WordCamps. It doesn’t really have to WordCamps, start off with meetups. There’s a lot out there, a lot of complicated things. Just stick to the basics.
Gutenberg Editor will be the next big thing in WordPress this year. How excited are you about it?
To be honest, I’m not that excited about the Gutenberg Editor. We don’t really use the editor ourselves. All of our systems are quite separate or different from the Gutenberg. Gutenberg is built in WordPress but it doesn’t use the traditional post-editor. It is supposed to be easier but I think it should to optional for people to use it.
You can get in touch with Mike Stott and learn new things through his Facebook and Twitter.